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H&R Block Software Glitch To Delay 600,000 U.S. Tax Refunds
mrquagmire sends this quote from a Reuters report:
"Tax refunds for about 600,000 taxpayers claiming an education credit will be delayed, the Internal Revenue Service said on Wednesday, citing a software glitch at some tax-preparation companies, including industry leader H&R Block Inc. Refunds may be delayed four to six weeks from mid-February, likely not showing up until late March, the IRS said. ... On Tuesday, a Wal-Mart Stores Inc executive said shoppers had cashed about $2.7 billion in tax refund checks at its U.S. stores so far this year. At this point last year, that amount was about $4 billion. The IRS delayed the start of the tax filing season by eight days, to January 30, due to the enactment of tax law changes made to resolve the "fiscal cliff."
Business quality meets government efficiency.
A software glitch?
I have a feeling that this software glitch is not really a bug, it's just when this function executed:
getTotalAvailableFederalBalance()
it returned 0, and somewhere along the line it triggered a condition known as: TreasuryIsBareException
You can't handle the truth.
I filed in late January and they told me at that time that the IRS wasn't accepting education credit submissions until late February and would delay refunds for about 2 months. Interesting that they now come out and say it was a software glitch.
And so I told that ther teachin' lady, the only letters I need tuh know is 'U', 'S'. and 'A'.
I'm just funny that way....
Trashy people that get their paychecks paid out at liquor stores.
The people that cash checks at Walmart, typically, have no bank. The businesses that Walmart is hurting with this service are the sleazeball check cashing folks. I'm not quite sure which way to feel about that.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
try
{
avail = getTotalAvailableFederalBalance();
}
catch(TreasuryIsBareException e)
{
printMoreMoney();
}
People who owe banks money and thusly can't keep a checking account.
Or impatient people who want to spend their refund before receiving it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Well, for one, morons who are attempting not to run checks through a personal/business account for purposes involving tax dodgery. In addition, most major banks charge a fee to non-customers anyway...Chase and Wells Fargo charge 5 or 6 bucks per check.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Ah, so you're making fun of the Americans' "voluntary" income tax payments?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Anyone with garnishments levied against them?
They charge ungodly amounts of money for starters. Me, Im single, I work one job, own one home, one car and everything in my life is very simple and so are my taxes but they insist on charging me 145 dollars to do my taxes. It used to be like 65 but every year it goes up and my taxes actually take like 15 minutes to do. Then they start sales pitching me on buying optional services and gurantees and so on on top of 145.
So I started doing my taxes online for free through simple google searches for a couple years and never had a problem.
Hell in my community I also found out a lot of people volunteer to do peoples taxes for free. My neighbor was a VP for us bank in the equipment leasing department till he retired and his wife worked for the irs and now they volunteer at the library 3 days a week to do peoples taxes for them for free, all you have to do is show up. And others qualified in the money field also volunteer their time as well. Hell, half my county gets theirs done free at the library this way.
Look at alternatives to expensive companies like this. Hell local tax attorneys charge small fees to do personal taxes.
First, this is old news, way old news....its done and gone
Second, it was a IRS software glitch, that effected every education form...the article title tries to imply that its H&R block and thats just misleading.
One of my school buddies had an excessively casual relationship with debts vis a vis debt repayments and ended up with his wages garnisheed. I am almost certain that the money was taken off before his employer wrote his paycheck.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
+1 informative. You're spot on.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
That's somewhat bigoted. If you have an excessive amount of bounced payments or overdraft fees, a bank may decide to close your account and not let you reopen it. Apparently banks share this information with other banks, so that once you're blacklisted, you can't have a checking account for a few years.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
That's exactly how it works. An alternative may be a chapter 13 bankruptcy, where you're forced into a 3-5 year payment plan. Your creditors are paid first, and you get paid what's left.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
So they hire IT guys as well with no experience who only work for tax season ?
I feel like $3-$6 is quite reasonable. That's about how much an ATM charges to withdraw money. I don't think walmart is actually as evil as people think. There are companies whose success I feel is much more detrimental to the community as a whole, particularly those which have no bid contracts with the government.
Check Cashing outfits do more to keep the lower class down than any 1%-er ever did. They need to be closed down. Next, we can go for the pawn shops, which exist solely to act as a fence for stolen property and thus to continue the cycle of poverty.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What sort of moron thinks that cashing check always requires paying a fee to cash a check?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Yep...Had a coworker quit his associate degree course at DeVry to take the job with us. Six months later he starts getting debt repayment notices for the school. By his reasoning he didn't owe any money since he didn't finish taking the classes (Yes he really believed this) so another six months go by and one day he just starts cussing and screaming obscenities. His check was less than $20! It was a very good day...he was a dick.
Many who cash their checks this way are illegals who do not have a checking account for fear of it leading the INS to their door. But I doubt this would effect them as they probably don't file taxes either.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Anyone who uses a bank.
rewriting history since 2109
Wal-Mart is only considered evil by a few hardcore leftists and a bunch of people who wouldn't be caught dead in there even if it paid high wages to its employees. Actual poor people love Wal-Mart, because it's so much less expensive and so much nicer in terms of quality and selection than the stores that preceded it.
I'm glad H&R Block has finally received some attention in any aspect of their IT practices, even if it was due to an issue with the IRS.
As an old employee who worked on the IT side dealing with their branch office systems I've witnessed absolutely frightening security practices. I'm talking about thousands of unencrypted tax returns sitting on desktops in vacant (sometimes for 6+ months) offices. In the area that I worked (inner-city) these offices were regularly broken into by the homeless. Servers would go missing and never reported. Hundreds of bags of paper tax returns brought from branch office to district office for shredding. These bags would often accumulate around the office for weeks before shredded, sometimes they were thrown in the dumpster because they couldn't wait for the shredders to show up.
If they've kept up the same practices as they did 6-7 years ago than any one of these single offices is an ID thieves dream.
What was that about being 'professionals' with all the right 'credentials'? How much did you spend on that last little media blitz? Way to eat your own shit HR block. You and Turbo Tax want a room for all that stank?
That may be true in some places. Where I live, if you find your stolen good at the pawn shop, you still have to pay for it to get it back. It's a real pain in the ass.
21st Century Renaissance Man
From experience, Wal-Mart is no cheaper than regular stores. Well, unless you are at the point in your life where 13 cents off a $50 item is a big deal.
If Wal-Mart's regular prices are cheaper than everyone else - there's a difference somewhere - it could be quality (Wal-Mart is known to ask suppliers to cut corners to meet the price it wants to sell at - so two seemingly identical products can be made extremely differently. These could be cutting back on features (e.g., wireless vs. wired), general build quality, accessories, etc).
The only time Wal-Mart truly is cheaper is during sales, and only then on the high-margin items.
Though, Wal-Mart does have some things going for it - they are a big-box department store without the traditional department store pricing and thus tend to be more accessible - Wal-Mart eschews the higher end and pricier stuff.
Of course most of their stuff is low quality, but it's better quality than what poor people had thirty years ago. I grocery shop there because my experience has been that it's considerably cheaper than Kroger for staples (though I don't buy steaks or cheese there), and that WM quality is usually good enough, because most of the time I'm not planning on abusing something. When I do plan to use something heavily, I shop elsewhere.
Sometimes quantity has its own quality, too - I wear $25 Under Armour T-shirts because they're really comfortable, but there have been times in my life that I would much rather have had five $5 shirts from WM.
Consider it this way:
Say you get a $250 check each week, which you take to Walmart to have cashed. If they take out $6, then they are removing 2.4% of your paycheck. If you get a paycheck each week, then you will get 52 paychecks in a year.
With a simple compounding-interest formula, they are making [ ( 1 + 0.024 ) ^ 52 = 3.43 ] or 343% interest on your paychecks.
You know, I'm not sure this way of looking at it actually makes sense. I might need to think about this a little more. Still, why not open a bank account and forego the fees?
It's $3 for checks under $1000 and $6 for checks over $1000.
The reason I say it's a good deal, is not that I think it's fine to pay $3 per paycheck. That's stupid when you can just open a bank account. The reason banks offer free checking, is because they get to invest the money remaining in your account and keep the profit, and maybe pay you a small interest rate. They make their money (just not directly from you). Walmart is essentially running a bank where every time money is deposited via check, it is completely withdrawn as cash. They don't get to invest your money, they just charge a fee. If every Wells Fargo customer did this, they'd have to charge you $3 too.
That's a pretty broad generalization. For one thing, many hardcore leftists are actually poor. Many of my friends fall into this category. Also many of the people complaining about Walmart's business practices are it's employees and contractors who tend not to be high up on the socio-economic scale.
I personally don't find many of these complaints very interesting because nobody is forced to work at walmart or be one of their contractors. If the best job you can find is working for/at walmart, you should be grateful they are there, because you'd have even worse options without them.
I never said the hardcore lefties were hypocritical, just that they were far enough into the movement that ideology would trump any practical considerations. I don't mind the True Believers who won't shop there even though they're poor; it's the people who wax poetic about Costco and keep asking why Wal-Mart can't be more like Costco when they'd never be caught dead in a Wal-Mart even if it were run just like Costco that drive me up a wall.
I also live in a poor part of the South, where the alternative to Wal-Mart is usually either nothing or a really awful place, but the WM is usually open 24/7 and has a certain basic selection of goods available in any store. People around here tend to look on the company a lot more favorably because of that.
I wasn't suggesting that you were implying they were hardcore lefties were hypocrites. I was just pointing out that all actually poor people don't love walmart. I don't even care about people who dislike walmart shopping there. I don't find it necessarily hypocritical. For one thing, one of the primary complaints of walmart is that it drives out other businesses (leaving only walmart to shop at). While this may be true, I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. But even for someone who doesn't like walmart, I wouldn't hold it against them for shopping there, if it was their only alternative.
I hate AT&T, but if they managed to eliminate all the other cell phone carriers I'd probably get an AT&T phone if my alternative was no cell phone, or only carriers with even more terrible service. I might admire someone willing to take a stand and boycott AT&T, but I wouldn't consider anyone a hypocrite for not boycotting. Each person can decide what level of activism they are willing to adopt and what they are willing to sacrifice for it. Some people just can't afford to take as many stands as they might like if they did not have other things to worry about. We all pick our battles.